I consult on content strategy for technology companies and produce web content for entrepreneurs and business owners. Currently I am traveling around the USA on an 8-month roadtrip (in a bright blue RV) exploring 3D Printing, 3D Scanning, and 3D Design. In the past, I have put pen to paper for the Wall Street Journal, Make, Sports Afield, the Pittsburgh Business Times and many others. You can follow my work via Twitter, Google+, or my site: RefineDigital.com

Yelp announced that it is powering the Microsoft Bing local search engine results. If users search on Bing, relevant Yelp reviews will display on the right side of the screen. Plus, Apple has joined forces with Yelp on its new maps application along with providing more content to Siri. This is a positive move for Yelp and for small business owners who have figured out how to use the service wisely. It is also a wake-up call for Google.

Yelp had an average of approximately 71 million monthly unique visitors in Q1 2012

6.3 million unique visitors used a Yelp mobile app

Every second a consumer looks up or calls a business from a Yelp mobile app (Q42011)

A photo was uploaded every 30 seconds from a Yelp mobile app

Yelpers have written over 27 million local reviews.

Over 40% of all Yelp searches come from their mobile apps. (Q4, 2011)

“Yelp will surface content including, review snippets, photos, business attributes, and more, to Bing users in the U.S. This content will be featured prominently on relevant Bing Local pages, presenting information to help consumers do more with businesses near them.” – Yelp news release

Yelp is one of the dominant replacements to the colored pages directories of the world and the antiquated idea that people still use those books with yellow paper in them. Except as doorstops or firestarters. Businesses either love Yelp or hate it. Those who despise Yelp are often business owners that feel trampled upon by the customer. Some of those complaints are warranted, but to think that consumer review sites are going to disappear any time soon, or ever, is a mistake.

How I titled this post is related to another post I wrote about Yelp that brought in a rash of owners angry that consumers had written a negative review about their company and that the service was a scam. The service is far from a scam and one that I believe can help a young (or established) company find new customers. However, if your company is not doing a good job, you will get negative reviews — or in more clear language — your business will get hammered by consumer reviewers. See below for advice on how to counteract “unjust” negative reviews.

As a marketing tool, many maker companies and small businesses are highly adept at leveraging new media tools, Yelp included. As mobile devices and local search continues to grow, we’ll see more entrepreneurial companies leap ahead of less nimble competitors who think Facebook, Yelp, or Google+ are fads.

Here are some of the things you should do to tap into the power of Yelp:

Claim your listing. Business owners can have a free account that enables them to respond to customer reviews (privately as well as publicly). Details from Yelp are here on the Business Owner’s Account page.

Take a deep breath before you respond to a negative review, but you should almost always respond. There are times when it is best not to and Yelp offers pointers on when you shouldn’t. That deep breath is true in just about any situation where someone criticizes you, but the internet has a long memory. Many customer service experts recommend viewing the negative feedback as a wakeup call to what you can fix. I’m not saying the customer is always right, far from it, but just proceed slowly as you think about how to respond. You can private message a reviewer once you have an account.

Try to get more reviews. As you receive positive reviews, they will eventually raise your “score” and push a negative review lower. It will still exist, but it won’t dominate your profile. It isn’t considered appropriate to request positive reviews from customers, but many merchants do it. It is better to encourage and welcome feedback. Yelp gives a lot of advice to business owners. Start here.

Consider advertising on Yelp. This is one of the areas where owners feel it is a bit of extortion. If you advertise on Yelp, you can remove competitors ads from your listing/profile page. I understand the small business owner’s perspective here, but it isn’t much different than other search engine result pages that show “sponsored ads” from your competitors. It’s a tough web world out there.

Yelp is a resource that consumers have grown to trust and use daily. This isn’t just for restaurants, either. People use it to find local businesses of all types and can see at a glance how others review that company. Lisa Barone at Small Business Trends (where I’m a product review editor) did a terrific post on its use and value for the SMB owner last year: Yelp Data Shows The Power of Mobile Marketing.

Share your Yelp story below. I’m eager to hear how it is helping small business, maker companies, small urban manufacturers, and of course, retail types.

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Much of the criticism that small business owners have with Yelp is their filtering algorithm that basically hides good reviews and removes them from the 5 star ranking average. Yelp claims that they typically filter reviews that are posted by people who are not “active” reviewers. This might be the person who writes only a few reviews or writes only positive reviews. While this might be a great strategy in urban markets where businesses receive a lot of reviews by patrons and local residents who are more “in to” social media, it is really hurting small businesses in smaller or suburban markets where the public is less interested or vested in social media and might not spend their free time writing reviews. Small town businesses or businesses in suburban markets might not have enough non-filtered reviews to average out a few negative reviews which can be really devastating and hurts their ability to attract new businesses. Yelp should not use a one size fits all strategy in their filtering review process. It would be more appropriate if Yelp would set a threshold of let’s say, 30 reviews to help out smaller markets. All reviews would be visible and contribute to the star rating up to 30 reviews. This would help small businesses that might only have 10 reviews and finds that 9 of them are “filtered”, while the 1 negative review from an active yelp eliter skews their star rating. Also, yelp claims that their community is self-policing and that their users can spot a poor review. I would like to see them add additional buttons that readers can press to review the reviewer including a “dumb” button, or “not-useful” button, or “inappropriate” button. This might discourage bad reviews that are meaningless and posted by immature people. And finally, while you might feel that Yelp is great for small businesses as long as the business offers a great product or service, it is too bad that yelp doesn’t follow that business strategy themselves. Have you ever tried to contact customer service from Yelp? It is non-existent. They never respond and they don’t even enforce their own terms of use. Damaging reviews that hurt small businesses and violate yelp’s terms are all over the internet and the business owner has NO recourse because Yelp won’t respond! If they do email back, it’s a meaningless form letter. Look at the reviews and star ratings for yelp – terrible! In my view, these review sites are for people with no social skills. As a long-time business owner, most people who have an issue or suggestion for my business are courteous enough to tell me in person and like most business owners, I will bend over backward to make it right. I have 9 filtered “great” reviews on yelp and 1 bad one from a person who visited my business once (for a haircut) and critiqued my massage and facial treatment rooms as being “small”, (but liked her haircut). To me, this is akin to giving a restaurant a 1 star review because you don’t like the tablecloth color without ever tasting the food! In my case, this woman never had a massage or facial but gave my business a 3 star rating. Her review is the only one that is visible and it is hurting my reputation in my small, suburban market. This woman is typical of may yelp reviewers who review chain stores and fast food restaurants in their quest to become an “elite” yelper. To take my story further, the kicker was an email that she sent me soliciting money for a charity that she is associated with in exchange for a better yelp review. This is also another troubling trend in the world of yelp – elite yelpers demanding comps in exchange for “not” writing a bad review. While this might not affect a businesses that has hundreds of reviews, it is damaging to those with only a few. This is the dark side of yelp. Small businesses are the ones that support local charities, school districts, scholarship funds and give communities a personality beyond the big box stores. They employ your neighbors. Why would someone in a community seek to hurt their friends and neighbors? Review sites like yelp are killing many businesses outside of large metro areas because their policies don’t fit well with this demographic. If a small business (like me) can’t attract new clients, it affects our ability to help local charities, hire more people, and we certainly won’t have extra money to advertise with yelp. I think your story is narrowly focused and poorly researched. I give you 1 star.

Wouldn’t this heading be more appropriate? with Yelp being so business unfriendly.

I really don’t know why small business owners still keep supporting Yelp. Yelps only source of cash flow is from small business and still they are so apathetic to small businesses. Having joined Bing, I hope this is a downward spiral for Yelp.

Problem is Apple is going to ruin its reputation with small business by join this team.

For small business, Google, Facebook and Foursquare will be more helpful and have to stay away from this Kill team.

Wow! What a great advertisement for Yelp! How much did Yelp pay you for that article? Or are you trying to help Yelp shareholders who are afraid the stock is going to be worth nothing in a couple of years?

User reviews=worthless.

1/2 are paid reviews by search optimization companies. 1/2 are by angry people who want revenge for something completely irrelevent to the business.

Waitress ignoring you because you look like a douchebag who is going to try to ask her out? Say you got food poisoning on Yelp! Say you found a human finger in your soup! Say the owner called you a racial slur!

Google bought Zagat to add credibility to their review system. Zagat reviewers are trained professionals, have a level of expertise, and have credibility. Yelp reviewers are horseshit. Yelp=zero credibilty. Yelp=abuse of a ridiculous, conceptually-flawed, and ultimately unprofitable website by people who know nothing and are not responsible for the truth or accuracy of what they write.

Thanks from the people who have shared about their negative experiences with Yelp. There is no perfect consumer review service. I don’t believe Yelp is out there to kill small business. I look at it as an opportunity and I’ve met many, many, many small business owners who view it the same. Here are two articles that you might find helpful if Yelp has caused you grief.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/youve-been-yelped_pagen_5.html

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/take-a-deep-breath.html

I had not read these articles prior to writing my own (but you’ll see that my advice of “take a deep breath” is certainly echoed in other places).

Thanks for the one-star rating, Simone. Your comment forces me to spend more time thinking of how I can be of service to my readers. I may use some of your thoughts in a future post about how to help SMB owners navigate Yelp and maybe even offer suggestions for Yelp to take to heart. For the record, I have spent a lot of time studying Yelp and they filter negative AND positive reviews. I think your suggestion of a voting button, of sorts, similar to Amazon, could help the stabilize the review structure.

My point to all small business owners, from doctors to lawyers and restaurant owners, consumer review services are here to stay. Google, Amazon, CitySearch, Yelp, UrbanSpoon, none of them is perfect. You can be mad at the system or you can keep working at it. The negative comments here are no different from what happens at Yelp. These comments give me a choice, too, to take a deep breath and respond professionally, without profanity, without retaliating, without taking it personal. I’m a pretty sarcastic and ornery guy, actually, so my first response would not be the most professional. I took a deep breath. Most intelligent consumers and readers see negative, attacking reviews and make their own decision, usually discounting the negative contributor, from all I’ve seen. I’m presuming, of course, that your review record has more than a solid one-star rating. I believe that mine does.

Here’s an example: I saw a review on Amazon where a book author got totally slammed by a one-star reviewer. 27 people marked that review as “helpful” and then commented that they bought the book despite the review. Do you know why? Because the author handled it kindly, professionally, with grace, and turned it around. I do work for three of the biggest small business sites on the web and I talk to hundreds of biz owners and I see positive outcomes more than negative.

A fraction of the world uses Yelp. If you think it is Yelp that is killing your business, you are wrong. If you think the big box stores are eating your lunch and that’s the only reason revenue is down, you’re mistaken. If I’m the first one to deliver that news to you, I’m sorry that you have no other allies who haven’t told it like it is.

I’m one of the most pro-small business people out there, imho. I am a champion for startups, for maker companies, for solo-entrepreneurs and small retailers. If you don’t like Yelp, use Google, use Facebook, use UrbanSpoon, use Citysearch, or one of one hundred others. You can get business from these services. If you see a fellow small business that is struggling, help them up. Offer your comments to help them stand up. Help them out on Yelp. I’m not tooting my own horn. There’s work to be done. Small biz, startups, are not easy. If it is easier to diss my work, feel free. As for me, I’m going to keep telling small business owners how to win and leveraging Yelp is one small way they can do it. I could have written this as a post and gotten paid for it. Instead I wrote it as a long-winded comment!

Nope. Nice try, but when somone creates a “system” and then asks you for $300 a month to take down negative reviews that may or may not have been written by Yelp employees, may or may not have been incentivized at a Yelp-hosted reviewer “party,” that is called EXTORTION.

And you still have not addressed the basic fundamental problem with user review websites: where is the credibility? What reason does anyone have to believe that what the reviews say is true? It is a documented fact that Yelp will remove or reorder reviews for businesses that pay them enough. This alone means that the overall content on Yelp is biased: a restaurant with 5 stars may actually be mediocre, but is paying the extortioner every month to remove negative reviews. A business with a low rating may have simply refused to advertise–for basic economic reasons–and ended up on Yelp’s hit list.

Your solution is for businesses to activate their accounts on Yelp to respond patiently to fake reviewers, thus increasing traffic to Yelp and making Yelp appear legitamate. I have another solution: Let’s let this idiotic, mismanaged, myopic, bloated whale of company die a natural death and let someone else find a way to do it right.

Here are two articles that might help you if you don’t actually want to help Yelp continue to slander and defame hardworking small-businesspeople around the world:

No doubt there are a lot of Yelp haters. I’ve read some of the posts (linked in comments and via email to me directly). Some have good points. Some are just rants. And Yelp probably has to do some reputation management on some of these issues. I’m not saying Yelp is perfect.

I’m also not backing down on my belief that SMB owners need to consider it, leverage it, use it. I’m not so sure I buy all the stories and complaints I hear from SMB owners, either. Those same belly-aching arguments are used against Amazon and Walmart and anything that makes people have to earn the business they get. For every negative comment, there’s a reality check waiting to be cashed by your competitors. It’s a tough world out there and if you stick your head in the sand someone is gonna come along and eat your lunch while you’re not looking, not working, not creating.

James, I value your comments. I just don’t buy into the idea that there’s an extortion scheme. I don’t think articles from 2009 are that accurate or helpful. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2011, I believe. I don’t believe they are going to die any time soon, either. They at least an order of magnitude larger than FourSquare and are probably about the same size as Citysearch. Google, no contest there. Yelp is the power of the people, the consumer as reviewer — no one is going to “review the reviewers.” Again there are likely some holes, but i don’t believe it is a sieve. There are millions of happy users. And great case studies of people who turned around a negative review by playing by new rules.

I’m surprised at how little mention there was in this piece of Google search as an alternative format for Small Businesses. Many of the commenters have pointed out just how expensive it is for a Small Business to work with Yelp. They’ve compared it to a protection racket. Yet the much larger, and much more cost-effective platform for them is Google itself. If the goal is to get to new prospective customers searching on their phones, the answer is doing Google mobile search. And surprisingly, only 5% of SMBs have tapped it, even at this late date. At mTrax (http://mtrax.com), we set up our clients in mobile search on Google, Yahoo, adn Bing, exclusively in click-to-call listings. These get into paid search, and generally appear in the first or second slot in the single column of results. It’s by far the best and most cost-effective way for SMBs to tap mobile to get calls from local customers.

I love YELP. The only reason you need to be afraid as a small business owner is if you’re not providing good customer service. Yelp.com gives the consumer the power to review a business and share their experience with other consumers. As a consumer I use Yelp to find just about everything. I own Bail Bond Woman and A Mobile Notary Public in San Diego, CA. Both are listed on Yelp.com There’s steady activity on both listings and calls from potential clients that feel comfortable because they’ve read what other clients have said about the service I provide. Having numerous 5-Star Reviews on Yelp helps drive the business. You can trust the reviews on Yelp since they FILTER them.